


Between the Bars

by Mairead1916



Category: The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-07
Updated: 2018-12-05
Packaged: 2019-07-27 13:08:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 16,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16219691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mairead1916/pseuds/Mairead1916
Summary: When Max Vandenburg first arrives at thirty-three Himmel Street, Lina--Hans and Rosa's youngest biological daughter--is unsure what to make of him, regarding him with a mixture of fear and guilt. Slowly, however, she develops a relationship with the man hiding in her basement, one that will both trouble and sustain her throughout the course of the war.Series of vignettes of the growing relationship between Max and Lina, an original character; basically, a response to envisioning Max as a romantic figure but wanting his relationship with Liesel to remain platonic/sibling-like





	1. I'll Keep Them Still

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song accompaniment: "Between the Bars," Elliott Smith

November 1940 

The first time they really speak to one another is during the book burning, not at it, of course, but while it is happening, when the streets of Molching and the house on Himmel Street are empty.

Mama, Papa, and Liesel have all attended the gathering, not because they want to but because they have to, because the destruction of knowledge—or standing witness to it—is now an integral part of the life of all good German citizens. Lina, a teacher, initially thought that her presence at such an event would not be required, would embarrass and shame the participants, but she has quickly learned that this is not the case. That in this new, better Germany, teachers do not so much educate as indoctrinate, quashing the development of ideas rather than encouraging them.

Tonight, she cannot bear to be a part of it, cannot bear to watch her students run around the fire, whooping and hollering in their Hitler Youth uniforms. Instead, she makes herself vomit, a trick she learned in her teen years, back when food was not plentiful but not as scarce as it is now, when there was enough of it for Lina to fear it, to fear turning into her mother—short and squat and dark, not what a German girl should be.

“I think I’m too sick to go,” she tells her father, performatively wiping her mouth as she leaves the bathroom. She feels guilty for her wastefulness, her cowardice, the fact that she, a grown woman, cannot face what her eleven-year-old foster sister will be forced to face.

Papa looks at her with understanding in his eyes, compassion. He knows.

“Too sick?” Mama calls from downstairs. There is no privacy in this house and never has been. Mama hears everything. “Tell her she has to go,” Rosa yells to her husband. “Tell her how it will look.”

At this, the bile in Lina’s throat rises of its own accord, a response to the rawness of her esophagus, of her shame. She rushes back into the bathroom and vomits in the toilet, retching even after the contents of her stomach have cleared. It is decided she should stay behind. Alone, though of course not completely.

She has hardly spoken to the man currently living in their basement, knows almost nothing about him. She thinks he is about her age, though she cannot be sure. His skinniness makes him look both old and young, the skin stretched tightly across his face like that of an old man, his thin arms and legs like those of a prepubescent boy. If she’s completely honest with herself, she must admit she’s a little afraid of him. He looks shocking and so scared, so sorry. Lina thinks he should be angry instead, or perhaps in addition. She wonders what he knows about her. If he knows that she teaches students with swastikas embroidered into their clothing, that a portrait of Hitler hangs on the backwall of her classroom, watching her, waiting for her to give him up. _Him_ being Max Vandenburg.

From her room upstairs, she smells pea soup burning on the stove and realizes, in the commotion caused by her feigned illness, Max has been forgotten, his dinner left to congeal on the stove. She walks downstairs, ladles the contents of the pot into a bowl, and opens the door to the basement.

“Hello,” she calls as she moves down the stairs. She is too embarrassed to use his name, feels that she has no right to it. Instead she offers her own. “It’s Lina.”

When Max pokes his head out from behind the drop sheet curtains of his hideaway, there is fear etched across his face. Lina realizes he has probably not learned the sound of her voice yet, that when she first spoke, she could have been anyone, a nosy neighbor, a member of the SS-Helferinnen, someone come to take him away. She feels terrible.

“Hello,” Max answers, and Lina is surprised by the rough quality of his voice—vocal chords rubbing against sand paper—realizing she is not yet familiar with his sound either.

“I brought you dinner,” she says. “Sorry to make you wait.”

“Did you?” he asks. Time is hard to track where he lives.

“I did,” Lina says as she hands him the bowl. Her insistence comes across as stern when she intended the opposite.

They apologize to each other at the same time. Lina smiles slightly. Max does not. 

Max’s body is still mostly hidden, and Lina can sense his desire to retreat entirely. Still, it feels impolite to leave him there to eat alone. Surely, he spends enough time alone as it is.

“May I join you?” she asks, thinking he might say no.

When he nods, she is momentarily paralyzed, unsure whether she should join him behind the drop sheet or invite him out. Luckily, Max decides for both of them, stepping out of his hole slowly, almost painfully, and taking a seat on an overturned paint can. Lina follows suit.

“Are you all right down here?” she asks. Max radiates discomfort.

“It’s more than I deserve.”

_No,_ Lina wants to say, _it’s less._ For some reason, she doesn’t.

Before she can think of what to say instead, her stomach interjects, gurgling loudly. Max immediately stops eating and looks at her.

“I shouldn’t have all this,” he says, his eyes darting from her to the half-empty bowl.

“No,” she reassures him. “I’ve already eaten.”

“But perhaps not enough. It’s because of—” Max looks despondent. Lina knows he was about to say _me. It’s because of me._ “I’m so sorry,” he says.

“No.” Lina reaches for Max’s free hand resting atop his knee. She squeezes it gently with her own, feels its iciness, withdraws. “If I’m hungry, it’s my own fault,” she says, offering no further explanation. A starving man does not need to know of her self-induced sickness.

Max’s body sighs—goes through the rising and falling motions—but makes no sound. He lifts the hand Lina has just touched, staring at it as if it is a foreign object he’s never seen before. Lina wonders when he was last touched. Lina wonders so much about him.

“What did you do before this?” she asks.

Max looks surprised to be asked about himself. He answers slowly. “A friend hid me.”

“No,” Lina says. “I mean, what was your job? What did you _do?"_  By which she really means, _Who are you other than a Jew hiding in my basement?_

“I worked in a factory until I was let go.”

“What then?”

“I did deliveries, some cleaning. It was hard to keep a job after that.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m a Jew.”

The look he gives her tells her this is the most obvious answer in the world. Of course it is. The question was naïve. Lina has the luxury of naivete, in this respect at least.

“How long were you hiding before this?” she asks.

“Two years.”

“And then you came here.”

“My friend was drafted. He couldn’t keep me anymore. I’m—”

Lina cuts him off, not wanting to receive another apology, to make him offer one.

“How did you get here?” she asks. “How were you not caught?”

He tells her about the barely adequate papers. The train, the snorer, the book. The footsteps to her door.

“Christ,” Lina says, more to herself than to him. Then, “You’re very brave.”

“Brave?” Max looks at Lina, showing a face in danger of disintegration. Then he turns from her and buries his head in his hands. His tears, like his sighs, are silent, but Lina can see the occasional drop escape from in between his spindly fingers. After several minutes of consideration, she picks up her paint can and moves it so she is sitting close beside him, their shoulders centimeters apart. Part of her wants to draw his hands away but another part of her recognizes this act for the violation that it is, the unwanted unmasking, yet another shred of privacy stripped away from him. Slowly, Lina lifts her hand and places it on Max’s back, in between his shoulder blades. His frame is so slight, she could easily wrap her arm around him, but to do so now strikes Lina as unfairly intimate, a claim to something she has not yet earned.  

When Max finally lifts his head from his hands, the first thing he says is, “I’m sorry,” and, even though Lina was expecting it, the apology physically hurts—hearing it hurts she knows, offering it too she suspects. So many sorrys, too many for one lifetime.

“You should hate me,” Max says.

“Why should I hate you?”

“I’m putting you and your family in danger.”

Lina thinks she could say the same to him. She’s a German after all, he’s a Jew, his family as well. She’s not a resister, not an active one at least, has done nothing to stop the dangers he and his people now face, is only now putting herself in harm’s way due to her father’s steadfast promise-keeping, not out of any choice she herself has made.

“We’re all in danger now,” she says. The words are true but sound hollow to her. “Some more than others,” she adds. _It’s not you who’s put us in danger,_ she wants to tell him. _It’s Hitler._ But even here, in the dark of the basement, she cannot bring herself to speak the words, cannot overcome her fear.

“I left my family behind,” Max says.

“I’m so sorry.”

“ _I_ am,” he says, an apology without the words. “I’m such a coward.”

“The rest of my family is at a book burning,” Lina says. “I’m not, because I was afraid. So, I made myself throw up, which is why I’m hungry now.” She pauses, debating whether or not to continue. “I’m good at making myself throw up because I used to be afraid of getting fat. Perhaps I still am.”

Max nods and there is not a hint of anger or pity in his face. What there is, though, Lina cannot say.

“I know it’s not the same,” she says. “But…” _But what?_ “Now you know, I suppose.”

Lina realizes her hand is still resting in the middle of Max’s back and wonders if she should remove it. _What would it mean to do so now?_ she wonders.

“I don’t even know if they’re alive or dead,” Max says. Lina presses the palm of her hand into his itchy, wool sweater.

“I’ll help you find them,” she says. “When all this is over.” And Max does not say, _I hardly know you,_ or, _I don’t believe you,_ or, _I don’t want you._ Instead, he says, “Thank you.”

Lina feels overwhelmed by the promise, even though she means it, perhaps because she means it. She focuses on the sensation of her hand against Max’s back, feeling his chill through his clothing.

“It’s freezing down here,” she says. “I’ll bring you more blankets.”

Max waves his hand in protest. “I couldn’t take any more from you.”

“It’s nothing,” Lina lies.

A week from now, when Hans and Liesel find Max shaking in the basement, frozen to his core despite the extra blankets, and bring him upstairs for a bath, Max will walk past Lina’s open bedroom door and see her stripped-down bed, bare except for a thin white sheet. Over the next several nights, he will return the blankets to her one by one, tucking them around her cool body as she sleeps.


	2. Unlocking

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song accompaniment: "Re: Stacks," Bon Iver

March 1941

The weather's growing warmer, and Max has been at thirty-three Himmel Street for five months. He has given Liesel _The Standover Man_ and in return she has given him the color of the sky, the feel of the air, and the excitement of the soccer match. To Lina, Max has given countless stories, not recorded like _The Standover Man,_ but remembered just as clearly as if they had been. He has described the brief flashes of his father he still possesses, the more vivid memories of his cousins and uncle and mother, of his fights with Walter, even his dates with girls from the neighborhood. Lina has given Max her attention, her memory, her questions. “And then what happened?” she asks daily. But, when Max asks her about her stories, she changes the subject, dissembles. Her stories are not as painful as his, not as governed by the specter death. And yet, they embarrass her, shame her. They are the stories of a person who has failed to act at every turn, who has actively avoided decision-making, who has fled at the first sign of fear.

“Tell me about Berlin,” Max asks her in the basement one night. The rest of the household sleeps above them. While Liesel goes to bed early, only to wake hours later from her nightmares, Lina tries to stay up as late as possible. She does not fear the nightmares—does not experience them—but does fear the moments before sleep, the minutes of lying awake in bed waiting for it, the external silence drowned out by her brain’s internal thrum, the listing of the day’s, month’s, and year’s failings. She has been this way for as long as she can remember, though, recently, ever since the war began, the thrum has increased to a roar. To avoid it, Lina stays up later and later, fighting against the sleepiness of her body so that, when her head hits the pillow, her brain will be tired as well, and she will fall asleep immediately, too exhausted to torment herself with endless rumination.

Max, of course, is both a ruminator and nightmarer, and, when he asks Lina at midnight about her time in Berlin, she can see the fear hiding beneath his mask of curiosity. It’s been a long day, and Lina thinks if she lay her body down and shut her eyes she could fall asleep instantly. She will not, however, leave Max alone with his thoughts. She must answer.

Early in their acquaintance, she told him about moving to Berlin after completing teacher’s college in Munich, about staying there for six months before moving back to Molching to teach with the nuns at the Catholic school. She has not told him why she left. She has not wanted to.

“Berlin was exciting,” she says. “Have you ever been?”

Max shakes his head no, which Lina knows already. She has asked him this before.

“How’d you decide to move there?” Max asked.

“My friend, Therese, was living there. My best friend, really. We grew up together. Here in Molching.”

Therese, unlike so many of the people from Max’s past, is still alive, but, remembering her now—her loud, unselfconscious laugh, her dark hair always held up by a mass of pins, her toothy grin—Lina smiles wistfully as if remembering an old friend she will never see again. It’s possible she won’t.

In Berlin, Lina tells Max, she lived in a tiny third-floor apartment with Therese and Therese’s boyfriend, Kurt, an arrangement that could have made her feel like a third wheel were the apartment not always home to one or two additional guests—Therese and Kurt’s friends usually, sleeping on couches or the floor after an overcrowded house party or night at the jazz club. Everything was busy in Berlin. The apartment, the streets outside, the people occupying them. It was the only place Lina had ever been that prevented her usual pondering. There were simply too many distractions. It was, in many ways, liberating. For six months, Lina acted without thinking. And, because she wasn’t thinking, she did things she never would have back in Molching or Munich. She joined Therese and Kurt at their clubs, buildings that had to be entered through back doors with passwords. She listened to illegal Billie Holiday records, the windows of the apartment flung open so anyone on the street below could hear, could report her. She worked a series of odd jobs for odd people, never questioning their political affiliations even when she knew she should. She wore pants and associated with Americans and even homosexuals. Five months into her time there, she accepted an invitation to one of Therese and Kurt’s political meetings and learned what she had, deep down, already known. They were communists and their friends were communists, and Lina was becoming one too. She sat there listening to their denouncements of Hitler and their speeches on communal welfare, terrified by how much she agreed with them.

As they walked home after the meeting, Lina caught Therese looking over at her inquisitively, trying to judge her reaction. Kurt had stayed behind to discuss “strategy,” and it was just the two of them now, walking down a nearly empty street.

“So, can we put your name on the list?” Therese finally asked.

Lina shuddered. Lists were—and are—dangerous in this new Germany “The list?” she asked.

“Can we count you in as a member of the party?”

“No,” Lina said. “No you cannot.”

Therese looked shocked, her easy grin falling from her face.

“Why did you bring me there?” Lina asked. “Why didn’t you tell me what this was going to be?”

“Because you already knew.”

“That’s not true.”

“It should be.” Therese stopped walking and grabbed Lina by the arm. Her grip was tight but not malicious. Excitement began to flicker around the corners of her mouth. “Isn’t it inspiring? All these people wanting to do something?”

“To do what, though?” Lina asked.

“To take a stand. Against poverty, oppression, Hitler.”

At the last word, Lina wrenched her arm free from Therese’s grasp and looked at her friend in horror. “Don’t say that.” She looked up and down the street, checking for passersby who may have heard. There was no one there.

“You know what’s happening in this country,” Therese said. “You can’t agree with it.”

“Not all of it.”

“Really, Lina? Which parts do you agree with?”

Lina didn’t answer. She turned from her friend and walked down the street, moving at a deliberate pace, feigning calm.

“Which parts do you agree with, Lina?” Therese caught up with her and leaned in close, whispering in her ear. “I want to know. Is it the murders, the roundups, the camps?”

“We don’t know what really happens there,” Lina said. “At the camps. People talk, but we don’t know.”

Now it was Therese’s turn to walk away, practically running, as if Lina were a monster she needed to get as far away from as possible. For the next week, Therese and Lina didn’t speak. However, when it came time for Lina to leave a month later—not a previously planned departure but one precipitated by the conversation of that night—there were no recriminations or anger. Just disappointment. It was never spoken, but, slowly withdrawing from Therese’s hug on the train platform, Lina could see the sorrow in her friend’s eyes, could feel it in her own stomach. It was a sorrow transformed into self-loathing, yet another branch to add to the tree already growing inside of her, another failure to add to her nightly recitation. It was the reason why, when she arrived at the station in Pasing and found Papa waiting for her, she was already crying.

“I’m sorry,” Lina tells Max. They are constantly apologizing to one another. Even as they’ve grown progressively more comfortable, this has not gone away. Sometimes Lina thinks it’s their guilt that has brought them together.

“It’s all right,” Max says, but Lina knows it is not.

“I don’t agree with any of it,” she says. “None.”

“I know that.”

“How?”

“Excuse me?”

“How do you know I don’t agree with it?”

“Because I know you.”

Lina smiles. She supposes he does.

“Sometimes I feel like a child,” she says, wondering if he knows this already too. “Since coming home. I can go back to the way things were before, with my parents. I don’t have to be an adult, not really.”

Max nods solemnly, then shakes his head, a gesture Lina has grown familiar with. His way of telling her he understands but does not agree.

“You work, though,” he says. “You support them. _Us._ ”

“Yes, but that’s making money,” Lina says, “not choices. That’s real adulthood, making difficult decisions. Even simple decisions everyday. It’s frightening to make decisions at a time like this.”

Lina looks at Max, wonders if he can relate, if he potentially relates too much, if she is being insensitive. She feels trapped in a period of stasis, but, if anyone’s life has been put on hold, it’s Max’s. Since their first meeting, she’s learned his age—twenty-four, two years old than her. Young but not so young. Not too young for a family. While she was living her relatively carefree life in Berlin, arguing about the camps and their horrors, he was hiding from those horrors, alone in the dark, for two years, not meeting anyone, not making plans, just waiting.

“I don’t make decisions anymore,” Lina says, trying to distract from Max’s suspended life with her own.

Max nods. “I don’t either.”

They’re both wrong, of course—the man who chooses every day to live, despite the world telling him he shouldn’t, that he doesn’t deserve to, and the woman choosing to keep him alive, who leaves the house every morning with a secret, with a fear she can tell no one.

There’s a comfort in being wrong together. 


	3. Fall Back Into Place

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song accompaniment: "Space Song," Beach House

October 1941 

There are Nazis in the Hubermanns’ kitchen and a Jew in their basement. The Jew has been there for eleven months, the Nazis for two minutes.

Lina sits at the table, her right eye swollen and red, a bruise beginning to form in the shape of a rifle butt. The Nazis stand around the table, towering over her. Mama stands behind her, an arm on her shoulder and a look of terror on her face, terror and barely disguised disdain. Papa stands closest to the men, his face contorted into an accommodating smile. Liesel stands in the doorway between the kitchen and living room, her hands balled into fists at her sides, her fury dangerously apparent.

“Herr Hubermann,” the tallest Nazi says, “do you know what your daughter did today?”

“I don’t,” Hans says, even though he does. “I’m sorry, Herr…”

“Offizier,” the Nazi corrects him. “She interfered with official party business, caused a scene.”

This is true. Today the official business of the party was to take one of Lina’s students away, a boy just ten years old. His father had been Jewish they said. Actually no. His father had been a Jew, they said. _Ein Jude._ It's a different thing, slightly.

The boy's father is dead, has been for years. Apparently, his sin has lived on, marked his son as well. 

When the Nazi came for her student, Lina told the boy not to leave, told him to stand behind her. She did not say,  _I'll protect you,_ because, deep down, she knew she couldn't. The Nazi took the boy from her, snatched him out of her grasp with ease—physical and moral.

"He's just a child," Lina pleaded. "Please. He's just a child."

The Nazi ignored her until she forced him not to, throwing her body between the man and the boy, trying to pull him back. Shouting something Lina was too distressed to understand, the man hit her in the face with the butt end of his rifle, knocked her to the ground. The pain was so intense, for a moment she let her eyes shut. When she opened them, the boy was being dragged from the room, and the tall Nazi was standing in the doorway, ready to catch her should she make a final run for the boy, which she did. It was no use. He caught her.

“He’s just a child,” she yelled as she was wrestled back to the ground.

“No,” the tall Nazi said. “He’s a Jew.” _Ein Jude._

 _He’s a child,_ Lina wants to say now, staring up at the tall man. _You’re evil,_ she wants to say. _Someday, justice will come for men like you, and I’ll watch and applaud and spit on your grave._

But there is a Jewish man in her basement, _ein Jude,_ and she cannot say any of this.

“I’m so sorry, offizier,” she says, looking from the tall Nazi to the slightly shorter one next to him, the one who took the boy in the first place. “I didn’t know he was a Jew.”

“Offizier Richter told you he was a Jew,” the tall Nazi says. “That should have been good enough.”

“Yes, I know,” Lina says, “but when it’s a student you’ve known for years you just don’t want to believe such a horrible thing.”

“His mother never told any of us,” the third Nazi says. He is the only one not in uniform and the only one whose name Lina knows. He is Heinrich, and he is a teacher at the school. From the moment Lina started work there, he has made his interest in her known. He has been very kind to her. He is also a Nazi. “The mother tricked us all,” he says. “No one knew.”

“She knew,” the tall Nazi says. “She knew as soon as Offizier Richter told her. It should have been enough.”

“Do you see what he did to her?” the third Nazi, Heinrich, says.

“She should not have gotten in the way,” the tall one says, “should not have interfered.”

“Yes,” Hans says, clapping his hands together as if the matter is settled. “Well, as you heard, she is very sorry. It won’t happen again, offizier.”

“Perhaps we should take her with us for further questioning,” the tall Nazi says.

“What’s there left to question?” Heinrich asks. “She told you she didn’t know. She explained it to you. The matter is settled.”

The tall Nazi opens his mouth to protest but the shorter one—the child-stealer—stops him with a hand on his arm. He says nothing, but gestures with his head to the door, and finally the tall Nazi relents.

“Good evening,” he says, giving first Hans and then Heinrich a final nod of acknowledgment before leaving through the door the shorter Nazi is holding open for him.

“ _Heil_ Hitler!” the shorter man yells so loudly Lina shivers.

“ _Heil_ Hitler!” the occupants of the kitchen reply, their arms outstretched. Then the two men are gone, and in the kitchen are Hans, Rosa, Lina, Liesel, and Heinrich—the final Nazi.

Lina wants nothing more than for him to leave, for the family to exhale a collective sigh of relief, for the kitchen to empty as they rush down to the basement to check on their Jewish guest. Instead, Heinrich snaps to action, directing everyone as if it were his own kitchen—“You, get a cloth.” “Get some alcohol.” “Where’s the ice?” It is a sign of Rosa’s continued bewilderment that she doesn’t argue.

A minute later, Heinrich is sitting on a chair pulled uncomfortably close to Lina, dabbing at the skin around her eye with a cloth soaked in rubbing alcohol. As Lina winces involuntarily, Heinrich apologizes, but his ministrations are rough, and he continues to press the cloth hard into Lina’s skin. When he is done with this process, he takes a cloth soaked in cool water and holds this up to Lina’s eye. There is no ice in the house. His pressure is excessive and, as Lina winces again, Liesel comes forward and taps him on the shoulder.

“I can do this,” she says.

Heinrich reluctantly rises, relinquishing his place to Liesel.

“Lina,” he says, reaching down and cupping her cheek in his palm, “I’m so sorry this happened to you.”

Lina nods. His hand is too warm, like the painful tingling of toes thawing by a fire, and Lina worries that when he removes it there will be a burn mark left behind. “Thank you,” she says as calmly as she can.

“Yes, thank you, Heinrich.” Rosa lifts herself from her stupor, placing a hand on Heinrich’s back and steering him toward the door.

Heinrich lingers, and for a moment Lina worries they’ll be treated to another _Heil Hitler._ Instead, he gives her one last look, one tentative smile, and then he is gone. He feels guilty but for all the wrong reasons. Lina wonders what she will owe him now, what he will expect from her. Perhaps nothing. He has always been so kind. Lina despises him.

As soon as the door closes, Lina, Liesel, and Hans rush to the basement door, stopping at the sound of Rosa’s hissed remonstrance. “What are you doing?”

They look back at her.

“Those men could come back at any minute,” she says. “We have to wait.”

“Rosa, they won’t be back,” Hans says but pulls his hand away from the doorknob.

“We have to wait,” Rosa repeats, walking to her usual perch by the stove, stirring the soup with shaking hands.

“I’m so sorry,” Lina says.

“No.” Hans shakes his head as Liesel slips her hand into Lina’s.

They eat in silence, eyeing the basement door anxiously.

“Someone should bring him his dinner,” Rosa finally says, and Lina rises from the table, accepting the invitation to go see him.

“Max,” she whispers at the bottom of the stairs. Her voice sounds frail to her, too quiet to reach him, but of course it does.

As Max emerges from behind the drop sheets, Lina sees him startle at the sight of her eye. He doesn’t ask what has happened. He doesn’t need to. Lina can tell he’s heard everything.

“I’m so sorry, Max. I’m so sorry I brought them here. I’m so sorry.”

Max shakes his head, dismissing the apology in the same way her father had, as if it were unnecessary. Lina knows it is necessary, though, can see the pallor on Max’s already sun-starved face, can only imagine what it must have been like to wait silently below, knowing there were Nazis just above him, child-stealers and murderers.

“Are you all right?” she asks.

“Are _you?_ ” Max says, coming closer, reaching toward the purpling corner of her face before pulling his hand back.

Lina nods. She does not plan to burden Max with her tears. He is plenty burdened already.

Max nods as well, reaches out for her again, this time for her waist, does not draw back. Instead he wraps his arm around her and guides her to the far wall, supporting her as they both lower themselves to the floor. His hands are so cold they chill her through the fabric of her dress, and Lina, who has been holding Max’s dinner, passes him the bowl of soup, thinking it might warm him. It doesn’t. When Max is finished eating, he sets the bowl down beside him and takes Lina’s hand in his, interlacing their fingers. It feels like being enveloped in ice. Slowly, Lina raises his hand in hers and presses it to her damaged eye, relaxing into its coolness. For minutes, neither one of them speaks.

“Max,” Lina finally says. She drops his hand as tears roll down her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. She sniffs, trying to contain herself, but the sniffle soon becomes a sob. “I’m so sorry,” she says. This time, the apology is all-encompassing. An expression of regret not just for bringing the men to their house, but for everything else. For Kristallnacht and the Nuremburg Laws, for the stars sewn into their jackets, for the roundups and deportations and killings. For the boy who was taken. For the hiding.

Max does not wave this apology away. "Yes," he whispers, tears forming in his own eyes. Then he wraps his arm around her, drawing her even closer. As Lina leans her head against Max’s bony shoulder, she worries she might break him. She wants to be near him, though, feels it like a long-ignored need. Eventually, her head slips from his shoulder and, instead of righting herself, she allows her torso to fall into Max’s lap, shutting her eyes as she feels Max's hand come to rest atop her head. She is not asleep and won’t be for several more minutes, will have to wait for it, but, despite her sadness, she feels more at peace with the waiting than ever before, Max’s cold hand holding her tethered to this moment, preventing her mind from drifting too far astray.

When Hans descends the basement steps hours later, he finds them both asleep, Lina’s head resting in Max’s lap, Max’s head leaning against the hard wall behind him, his hand holding the crown of Lina’s head as if she might float away otherwise. Hans thinks he should perhaps muster up some sort of disapproval, knows most fathers would if they found their unmarried daughters in such a position. But he can’t seem to do so and doesn’t try particularly hard either. Instead, he walks to Max’s hiding place and searches behind the drop sheets for two blankets, one of which he places over his daughter and the other of which he wraps around the shoulders of the man he’s grown to love as a son.

 

 


	4. If You Have to Go

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song accompaniment: "If You've Gotta Go, Go Now," J. Tillman

September 1942

The night Max Vandenburg leaves thirty-three Himmel Street, Liesel cries. Though she feels as if her back will break from the weight of her sadness, Lina does not, because Liesel is young and has lost so much already and Lina wants desperately to make things better for her rather than worse. Liesel does not cry the next day, however, because she is young and has lost so much already, and, as young people do, she has become accustomed to it, has not learned to “get over” the losses, but to carry on, to walk through life with a burden on her heart.

Lina does cry the next day and the day after that and the day after that. Privately so as not to bother anyone. In her room at night, her face buried between her knees. In the bathroom at school, her teeth clamped down hard on her knuckles to prevent any sound from escaping. And finally, in the basement, behind the drop sheets, which no one has bothered to take down, perhaps out of respect.

It is here that Mama finds her on the third day, sobbing into her hands, her fingers as icy as Max’s used to be. Lina expects a reproach but doesn’t get it. Instead, Mama kneels down beside her, pulling her into an almost smothering embrace.

“Oh, my love,” she says. “I know. I know.”

 

But this is just the end. Before, there is so much.

 

It is February and Max has just crumpled to the floor, his head hitting the accordion case. Lina worries he has died then and there, but then Hans lifts Max into his arms and Lina can see the slow rise and fall of Max’s chest.

Every morning, she creeps into his room—Liesel’s room—to see if he’s still breathing. Some days, his chest hardly moves at all and she has to stick her hand under his nose, feel his fluttering breath that way. Other days, even this is faint, and she presses her ear to his heart, listening for its faint beating. On these occasions, she wonders if he will live through the day. Then she packs up her things and walks to school with Liesel, both of them worrying Max will not be alive by the time they get back.

While Liesel reads to him and brings him gifts, Lina doesn’t know what to say or do. She stares at him silently as he sleeps, feeling rude. One day, she brings her mouth down to his ear, so close her lips touch cartilage, and whispers, “I love you.”

 _I know,_ she imagines him responding, which is strange given that _she_ did not know, not until the moment she said it.

 

It’s March, Max has been awake for three months, and the party is checking basements. The man they send is nicer than the men who visited their home last year, the ones who took the boy away, who stood in their kitchen making threats. Still, he is a Nazi. It’s important to remember that. Liesel and the Hubermanns do.

When he leaves, they do not wait upstairs in case he returns, as they did with the other men. There willpower is depleted. There have been too many scares, large and small. As they rush down the stairs, they assume Max will hear their footsteps and recognize them as theirs, will take it as a sign that the danger has passed. They should announce themselves, but they don’t. When they pull the drop sheets away, they find Max, crouched, wide-eyed, brandishing his scissors like a knife. He is clearly terrified, deranged-looking, seeing something other than what is in front of him—SS perhaps. Before it is clear whether he recognizes them or not, Lina steps forward and pulls him into a hug. The scissors clatter on the ground.

 

It’s early September, the middle of the night, and all the residents of Himmel Street—all but one—huddle together in their neighbor’s basement, the only one deep enough to protect them from falling bombs. Outside, the world is quiet. When bombs hit, the world shakes, but most of them don’t know that yet, don’t know that the quiet is a good sign. They should know perhaps, but war does not encourage common sense.

Lina and Liesel sit side by side, holding hands and breath. Their sporadic squeezes say, “I’m thinking about him too.”

When they’re told it’s safe to leave and they return home, Max is gone. Panic rises in their throats until they hear a voice behind them.

“I’m here.”

They turn to see Max standing in the corner of the room.

“I couldn’t help it,” he says. He looked outside.

For reasons she can’t explain, or even understand herself, Lina feels on the verge of tears, avoids looking at Max for fear of crying. As the family trudges back upstairs to their beds, Max taps Lina on the shoulder, holds her back.

“Are you angry with me?” he asks, sounding far younger than his twenty-six years.

“No,” Lina says. She has no right to be. And she’s not. It’s something else. “I—” she begins, sorting out the feeling as she gives voice to it. “I thought you might die. I thought you _would_ die.”

Max nods.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t know why I thought... I was so scared.”

"Yes," Max says. If there's one thing he understands, it's fear. He breathes out shakily, almost crying himself. Then he walks toward Lina with his arms open. Closing them around her, he whispers his own apology as Lina shakes her head no against his rough sweater.

 

It is late September 1942, the night of Max’s departure.

Max and Lina are alone in the basement. They stand so close, they can’t even see each other’s faces, Lina staring at the ragged edges of Max’s coat collar, Max staring over her head at the letters he and Liesel have drawn on the wall.

“I want you to know,” Lina says, “in case it’s helpful to you later, that I love you.”

Max makes a sound somewhere between a sigh and a whimper. He takes a step back, and Lina looks up at his face, his swampy eyes even more watery than usual. He blinks rapidly, kisses her on the forehead, then turns and leaves.

Later, he will tell her this is what he thought was best for both of them, but Lina will never quite believe him.

 

 


	5. Cannot Forget What I Have Seen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song accompaniment: “A Violent Yet Flammable World,” Au Revoir Simone

August 1943 

When the Nazis first start marching their prisoners—their victims—through the streets of Molching, Lina is not sure which is better, to watch or to turn away. She knows which is easier. To turn one’s face from suffering is always more comfortable, safer. But this would be cowardly, she knows, and so, when the first trail of humans staggers through town, she stands on the edge of the throng, watching, bearing witness. Some of the humans look at her, make eye contact, and Lina does not look away. After a while, though, she begins to see the shame on their faces, the pain in their eyes, and wonders what good she’s really doing. What makes her different from anyone else, she wonders. How can the marchers—the strugglers—tell the difference between her and those who have come to gape and jeer? How is she different from those who look on uncomfortably, telling themselves this is necessary for the betterment of Germany, for the German people, supporting Hitler’s plan for the Jews, only wishing they didn’t have to _see_ it? She can provide them no comfort and therefore should perhaps provide them no audience either. She is about to turn and go home, when Papa makes his terrible mistake.

There is the hushed confession in the basement—the whispered, “I love you”—and then Max is gone.

There is the crying at home and at school. And then Papa leaves and she must recover, must pull herself together for Mama, must give her one less thing to worry about.

When the second parade of Jews comes through Molching, Lina stays inside, tells herself Max could not possibly be among them. She is wrong, of course. He could very possibly be among them. But, today he is not.

She does not watch the third march either. She is teaching and does not even know about it, hearing of it later from Rosa. “He wasn’t there," her mother says. "I looked.”

The marches become frequent but never routine.

Amongst it all is a dead son—Frau Holtzapfel’s son—and a dead pilot—someone’s son—and many things Lina knows she should care about but can’t. Her papa might be dead, Max too. Not  _her_ Max, she reminds herself. Most likely, she will never see him again.

When Papa returns, Lina cares very much, and when another son dies—also Frau Holtzapfel’s—Lina cares about this too.

When the Jews are marched through town that August, Lina watches from a distance, not willing to gawk and not willing to ignore either. Liesel will be running alongside, she knows, looking for Max.

The marchers are all so skinny it’s hard to determine their age as they trudge past. Just like Max when he first came to live with them. Lina wonders why she’s trying to guess at their ages, realizes she’s looking for Max as well.

The first man clearly Max’s age is also clearly not him. He’s large and robust-looking, must have been caught only recently. Lina wonders where he was hiding before, how he could possibly be so well-fed. The next young man is stooped, his posture that of someone much older, but his eyes give him away, lifting themselves up to search the crowd gathered by the roadside, lingering just a little too long on the face of every woman over forty, every mother-like figure. His eyes are pleading, begging for solace, and some of the women give it to him, lending him small, reassuring smiles. This man is too young, Lina thinks. Too young to be Max. Too young for any of this.

When she finally spots him, it is Liesel who leads her, Liesel who she sees first, weaving through the mass of bodies, stopping when she reaches the man with swampy eyes and hair like twigs. Lina watches as Liesel falls and Max helps her up with shaking arms. Her breath catches in her throat and she presses her palms against the building behind her, trying to siphon some of its warmth into her icy fingers.  

Lina wants to run to him, wants to run to both of them, but knows how it will look. A young girl exhibiting such strange behavior towards a Jew marched through her town can perhaps be explained away. A girl and her adult foster sister both rushing to the Jew is less easily explained, is the sort of thing that marks a family, provokes questions, gets people killed. Lina will not make the same mistake as her papa.

The soldiers have spotted Liesel now and one of them has approached her, has his hands on her, is throwing her out of the stream of humans and onto the ground. Lina moves toward the commotion in a stutter step, first running to Liesel, then calming herself, slowing to a brisk walk. Before Lina can reach her, however, Liesel has gotten to her feet and reentered the mass. She finds Max again, stands beside him, and they both stop, two pillars in the middle of a sea. Lina stands just feet from them, wanting to call out, remaining silent. When Max and Liesel are caught again, and a whip is produced, and the tail is brought down upon Max’s seared skin, Lina screams. She cannot help herself.

“Stop,” she yells, running forward, and, as Max falls to the ground, he turns to look at her, noticing her for the first time. For a second, perhaps less, he smiles at her. His face looks like it might crack open from the strain.

Lina wants to touch him, to feel his realness, to take him by the hand and pull him away from all this. She wants them to run as fast as they can, only stopping when the Nazi’s bullets soar through them, fell them. Instead, Lina hears another crack and turns to see the whip falling across her sister’s body, digging into her.

“Stop,” Lina says again, wrapping her hands around the arm brandishing the whip, looking into the eyes of the soldier attached to that arm, pleading. The soldier grunts and shakes her off, whips Liesel again. Liesel stumbles, her body hits the ground, and still the soldier lifts the whip, prepares to strike. Out of the corner of her eye, Lina sees Max ordered to his feet, forced to stagger away, a final terror in his eyes before he is made to look away. She sees the blood soaking through his shirt, growing bullseyes on his back. She sees Liesel watching too, sees the tears and angry red lines on her sister’s face. As the whip flies throw the air, Lina places herself in its path, between it and Liesel. She catches it on the right side of her face, feeling it cut her eyebrow in half. She knows the soldier is about to push her away any second. She closes her eyes for a moment, sees the blood seeping out of Max and Liesel’s bodies, and launches herself at the soldier, surprising him and knocking him to ground. She is no longer thinking of what this must look like, of what it might say about her family, about the dangers. She has forgotten that she is a grown woman, a teacher. She is now on top of the man, punching the way she did in her sole childhood fight, when she managed to knock her opponent to the ground and sat on top of him with her fists flying, knowing she would soon be thrown off, that she had to get all her hits in now, that she would ultimately lose the fight.

Lina loses this fight too, of course, is quickly pulled to her feet and held in place so the man with the whip can bring it crashing down upon her, clipping her heels each time he raises it from the ground, ripping her clothing as the whip’s sting carves its way into her back. Lina is not hit as many times as Max. She falls early, and, once she does, the whip mercifully stops. Then the boots begin, kicking her hard in her stomach, her shoulder, her ribs. Breathing becomes difficult, and for one dispassionate moment Lina wonders if this will kill her. It doesn’t, of course. Humans can withstand far more than they think. After watching the parade of strugglers pass through town, Lina should know this.

The soldiers only stop when they realize their train of suffering has left without them. They run after it, calling for their fellow Nazis as if calling after friends who have continued walking while they’ve stopped to tie their shoes. When Lina is finally able to see more than the torrent of black, shiny boots, she looks up the street, searching for the Jewish fist fighter, the man who has done what she just did countless times in life, but Max is gone. 

As Liesel stoops to help her up, Lina sees her sister’s mouth moving but cannot hear what she’s saying. The world around her is muffled, submerged. Liesel gently maneuvers Lina's left arm onto her shoulder, her lips moving silently. When Rudy runs over to support her other side, Lina sees but does not hear his questions. When Rudy and Liesel manage to get her home and Rosa answers the door, Lina sees her mother’s mouth open in a gasp but hears nothing. Lying in bed, curled on her less bruised side, she lets Mama minster to her, hardly reacting.

It takes just hours for news to spread, for everyone to know, and the first words Lina hears clearly belong to Heinrich, the Nazi teacher, come to tell her she’s been let go.

“I’m sorry,” Heinrich says. “There was pressure from the party.”

 _You’re in the party,_ Lina wants to tell this man who has always been kind to her, this man who leads Hitler Youth meetings on the weekends.  

“Thank you,” she says. Her back is turned to him and she does not bother to face him, talks instead to the gray wall in front of her. “Thank you for letting me know.”

Lina hears Heinrich’s footsteps moving toward her, hears the faint rustle of his shirt as he lifts his arm to touch her.

“Thank you, Heinrich,” she says before his hand can reach her.

Heinrich makes a noise of acknowledgment, brings his hand down to rest at his side, and turns, his footsteps carrying him outside.

When Liesel crawls into bed beside her, Lina sees the lines on her chin and collarbone, touches them gently. “Have Mama and Papa taken care of you?” she asks.

Liesel nods, stares into Lina’s eyes for a long time.

“He’s still alive,” Liesel says.

“He is,” Lina agrees.

Neither one of them knows if this is a good thing.


	6. I'll Be Gone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CN: brief descriptions of eating disorder behaviors and life at Dachau
> 
> Song accompaniment: "How to Disappear Completely," Radiohead

August-October 1943

Lina wakes every morning wondering if Max is dead or alive. Max wakes wondering the same.

She lives in Munich now, working a factory job procured for her by Trudy, or more accurately by Trudy’s boss. After the incident with Max, the Hubermanns had their third set of Nazi visitors, and it was decided that this would be best, safest.

The scar on her face won’t fade. It runs from her right eyebrow down to the middle of her cheek, a red line, thin like it was drawn with a pencil, its fineness belying the violence that put it there. Thankfully, there is no damage to the actual eye, or so a doctor has said. Still, when Lina looks at herself in the mirror, her reflection is often blurry, her green eye, dry and irritated, transfiguring itself into Max’s swampy brown one, wide and terrified as the soldiers descend upon Liesel. Lina avoids mirrors these days, doesn’t like to see her own reflection, doesn’t like to see Max’s either—except on the days she does, on the days she can’t help herself.

She has stopped eating, not entirely, but mostly. This time, she is motivated not by fear but by punishment. Punishment for her foolishness, her cowardice, her existence. Her flight from Himmel Street has deprived her family of an important source of income. The less she eats, the more money there is to send home. The painful gnawing of her stomach makes her feel good, distracts her from everything else. When she lays her head on her pillow at night, she is so exhausted, she falls asleep immediately, shutting the door on the lingering thoughts that once plagued her.

She keeps this up for a month, starving herself until the whole world is covered in fog, blurry like her reflection in the mirror. What little weight she managed to hold onto at thirty-three Himmel Street drips off her. When she collapses on the factory floor, the doctor who examines her is shocked at the sight of her ribs, her spindly wrists and ankles.  

“You’re starving to death,” he says.

“So are millions of people,” Lina answers. She’s read the reports of starving Russian civilians, the gleeful pontificating over Stalin’s failure to feed his own people. She’s seen the Jews marched through the streets, seen Max.

The doctor is unconcerned with these millions. They are not Germans, even the ones born here.

“Well,” he says, “that doesn’t mean that you have to.”

“Oh yes,” Lina says. “Food is one of the luxuries provided to good German women.”

“As it should be,” the doctor says. Perhaps he has missed her sarcasm, perhaps he is just choosing to ignore it.

 

When Max collapses on a work detail at one of the sub-camps, no one brings him to a doctor, not the first time anyway. Not the second or third either. He has no idea what number it is when someone finally bends down to pull him to his feet. The someone is a Nazi guard and Max is sure the action is not motivated by concern over the frequency of his falls. It is a random act, as is almost everything at the camp. None of the prisoners knows why anything happens, or when it will happen.

As Max is roughly pulled to the infirmary, he tries to reason with the guard, to reason within an unreasonable system. “I’m all right, really,” he says. “I’m so sorry. It won’t happen again.”

Without so much as looking at him, the guard elbows Max in the stomach to shut him up, preventing him from falling with a sharp yank on his arm.

Entering the infirmary, Max is gripped by terror. In this place, doctors don’t heal people. As the doctor puts his hands to Max’s throat, feels his lymph nodes, Max tries to determine what will get him out of here the fastest, with the least interference.

“You’re fine,” the doctor says. “Just need to eat more.”

Max looks up at him. His best chance is appeasement, conciliation. “How do you suggest I do that?” he asks.  

Outside the infirmary, the Jewish fist fighter is whipped. 

 

Trudy meets Lina at the doctor’s office and walks her home, a worried arm wrapped around her waist.

“Do you need money for food?” she asks.

Lina ponders this for a moment, deciding whether to be kind or cruel.

“Maybe you should have asked that back when I was living at home,” she says.

The arm around Lina jerks slightly, but Trudy does not remove it.

“You had a good job then,” Trudy says. “Just as good as mine.”

“But there were…” Lina pauses, almost says five. “There were four mouths to feed. My salary wasn’t enough.”

“Was it really that bad?” Trudy asks. It’s a genuine question.

“Yes, it was.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

Lina thinks of Max, of the Jews marched through the street, of Trudy whose boss sells munitions, whose bonuses are suspiciously timed to the ebb and flow of war.

“You know nothing,” Lina says.

Trudy turns her head away from her sister. While she has inherited Mama’s figure, she has not inherited her temperament. When she speaks next her voice is soft and watery. “Just eat something,” she says. “Please.”

When they reach her apartment, Lina leaves without apologizing.

 

On October seventh, the bombs fall on Himmel Street.


	7. Now That I'm Here

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song accompaniment: "The Fairest of the Seasons," Anna Nalick

October 1943-October 1945

Two years pass between the destruction of Himmel Street and the return of Max Vandenburg. After the bombing, Lina moves back to Molching, renting a small apartment in the center of town for Liesel and herself. She invites Trudy to move in too, offers her a spot in the family they are recreating. Trudy declines with tears in her eyes, and Lina realizes for the first time just how much she has pushed her older sister out of her life, how much she has failed her.

For the first six months, getting out of bed is physically painful. It must be done, though, for Liesel’s sake, if for nothing else. Lina does not realize Liesel tells herself the same thing each morning. _You must keep living. You must get up. You must do it for Lina._

For the same reason, Lina begins to eat again. It is difficult, each bite filling a hole in her she’d prefer to leave empty, but she does it for Liesel. And for Trudy, her sister who wordlessly took her abuse on the streets of Munich, who made no reply except to ask her, to beg her, to eat.

Lina is still not wanted at the school but finds a job with Mamer, the grocer. Her help is not truly needed, and she suspects the usually taciturn man has given her the job out of pity. Often, Lina wonders just how pitiable she must seem. Even with Mamer’s generosity, money is scarce, and Lina worries she may have to accept Liesel’s previously refused offer to leave school, to get a job as well. Then, just as the money is running out, an envelope is shoved through the mail slot in the door. It is stuffed full with Reichsmarks, and, after this, a new delivery is made every month. One day, Lina sees the delivery as it comes in. She runs outside, calling after the gray-haired woman rounding the corner of the building, a woman who looks suspiciously like Ilsa Hermann.

“I think this money is from the mayor’s wife,” Lina tells Liesel that evening.

“Yes,” Liesel says. “I know.”

“You’ve known? How?”

“Who else has that kind of money around here?” The question sounds like an accusation, an indictment of Frau Hermann. A look of guilt passes over Liesel’s face.

At dinner the following week, Liesel says, “She must want me to go to school,” and Lina knows she is speaking of the mayor’s wife. “She told me not to punish myself,” Liesel says.

Lina nods solemnly. “She’s right.”

“But sometimes it’s easier, don’t you think? To sit with your punishment?”

“Since when have you ever done things the easy way?” Lina asks, moving her food around her plate, knowing she’ll have to move it to her mouth eventually.

“Never,” Liesel says, watching Lina intently as she lifts a potato to her mouth, takes a bite.

 

A year after Himmel Street’s destruction—after the demolition of Mama and Papa and Rudy and everyone else they loved—Lina and Liesel are finally able to talk about it. Only to each other, of course, and only in short clipped sentences, Liesel recounting the story of the bombs in spurts, Lina prompting her with questions, not because she needs to hear but because she knows Liesel needs to tell.

More than the bombs and the deaths, they talk about life, about Mama and Papa and what they used to be like. Saying “used to” is hard. Papa’s accordion sits on a shelf in the living room.

They do not talk about Max, do not reminisce, as if doing so would put him in danger, doom him to the same past tense as their parents.

When Lina looks in the mirror, there is still a red line drawn across the right side of her face, taunting her, reminding her of what she and Liesel pretend to forget.

 

Max returns to Molching on a Tuesday. Finally released from the Displaced Persons camp at Dachau in October 1945, it's the first place he's thought to go. At the outskirts of town, he turns, purposefully avoiding Munich Street, the road he was marched down all those years ago—in reality only two, but it feels much longer. So much has happened since. Navigating his way to Himmel Street, Max realizes he has never learned the geography of Molching. It makes sense. It’s the Hubermanns that were his real home, not the town. The town did not want him.

Again and again, Max finds himself lost amongst the winding streets, has to ask passersby for directions. Each time, they look at him strangely, offering directions incredulously, as if his wanting to go there is ridiculous. They must sense his Jewishness, he figures. These things don’t change overnight, he reminds himself. With each thank you he offers, he means it just a bit less.

The third person he asks, a priest, looks at him the longest. “Perhaps I should go with you,” he says.

“Oh,” Max replies, trying to laugh slightly, to hide his anger, “I don’t think that’s necessary.”

“I think it is, son,” the priest says. When he puts his hand on Max’s shoulder, Max jumps, feels his heartbeat rising, but only for a minute. Then the beating slows, relaxes. Things are getting better.

As they walk, the priest begins to speak several times, then shakes his head, and falls silent. Max wishes he would make up his mind—speak or not. And then, suddenly they’re there, standing in front of a pile of rubble.

“Is this?” Max begins.

“Himmel Street is the next one over,” the priest says, and for one foolish second, Max is full of hope, but when he looks again, truly sees what’s in front of him, he realizes the rubble extends far beyond where they are standing, well into Himmel Street, or the area that once was Himmel Street.

“They built Munich Street back up,” the priest says, “but the rest…”

Had Max entered town via Munich, he likely would have seen this earlier, would have understood what was waiting for him.

“This is Himmel,” the priest says after they’ve walked a few seconds. It looks exactly the same as the other street, and Max wonders how the man knows the difference. “My church was here,” the priest says, sensing the question. “I was gone that night.”

Looking at the battered street, the crumbling stones and brick, Max searches for his home, the one _he_ was gone from.

“Do you know which one is thirty-three?” he asks. “Can you tell the difference?”

“No.” The priest shakes his head slowly. “I’m sorry.”

The priest’s hand is still on his shoulder, but now Max walks away from it, toward the refuse concentrated in house-shaped piles. He climbs over rotting beams and stacked bricks until he makes his way to the center of each mound, each house. It’s the basements that would be left, he tells himself. Surely, if he stands in the right one, he’ll know.

Max works his way from house to house, from one end of the street to the other. There is nothing left, no distinguishing characteristics. All the piles feel the same. At the final house, he sets his suitcase down and sits on top of it. He picks up a loose brick at his foot and throws it. Then he buries his face in his hands as his body gives way to convulsing sobs. There is so much he doesn’t know, his memories of family plagued by uncertainty—are they living or dead? But this? This he thought would be here, this he had counted on.

At the feel of the priest’s hand on his shoulder once more, he looks up, tries to quell his shaking.

“Did you know someone who lived here?” the priest asks.

“I lived here.” He whispers it. A secret, it cannot be spoken at full volume.

“I thought I knew everyone—” the priest begins. Then it dawns on him. He breathes in quickly as if Max has just hit him in the stomach. “With whom?” he asks.

It’s not a secret anymore, Max realizes. Doesn’t have to be. Who’s left to get them in trouble now? Who’s left to be in trouble? “The Hubermanns,” he says, a few decibels more loudly.

“The Hubermanns?” The priest’s grip on his shoulder tightens. “The daughter survived. Their foster daughter. She was in the basement when it happened.”

Max’s heart leaps into his throat. He feels as though it might come bursting through his mouth. “The other daughter?” he asks. “Did she survive too?”

“None of their other children lived there.”

“But Lina? Did Lina…” He can’t finish the question.

“Yes,” the priest says. “She survived. She was in Munich. Moved back now.”

Max feels himself falling forward, lets it happen, catching himself on stinging hands and knees.

“Hans?” he asks, looking up at the priest. “Rosa?”

“No. I’m sorry.”

“But Liesel?” He needs to hear it one more time, to know he hasn’t imagined it. “Lina?”

“Yes,” the priest says. “They made it.”

“Ah,” Max emits. It is a noise of sorrow, joy, and utter relief. He brings his forehead down to the ashy ground. “My god,” he says. “My god, my god.”   


	8. If You Need Me There

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song accompaniment: "Can't You See - Acoustic Version," Matthew And The Atlas

October 1945

The night of Max’s return, Lina pulls the mattresses from her and Liesel’s beds and sets them together on the floor, their edges flush so she, Max, and Liesel can sleep spread across them, so they will not have to be parted for even a moment. It is terribly improper, not the way a grown and nearly grown woman should host an unmarried man, but none of them protests. It’s not even spoken of, so obvious is it that this is what they must do, that this is how close they must be.

They stay up late into the night, hardly talking, just looking at one another. When they finally settle themselves in bed, Liesel sleeps between Max and Lina, as a child might sleep between her parents. Though Liesel’s life has forced her to grow up quickly and she is no longer a child in either temperament or age, the arrangement feels right. Fulfilling her temporary role of child, Liesel falls asleep first, leaving Max and Lina to whisper and stare across her.

Wordlessly, Max reaches toward Lina. She can see numbers tattooed to the inside of his arm. His fingers trace her red line. Lina closes her eyes, thinks back to the day it was drawn across her.

“Sorry,” she says.

“For what?”

“It’s a reminder.”

“God, no,” Max says. “Don’t ever apologize for this. Not to me.” His cool hand cups Lina’s cheek. “Does it bother you?” he asks. “The way it looks?

For years, how it looks is the last thing Lina has worried about. It’s the memories she’s run from, not the aesthetics. Still, she is not entirely at piece with the visual either. It’s easy to miss at first glance—a blessing—but she hates the feel of second glances, of people staring at her from across the room, trying to determine if the faint line they see is permanently etched into her face or just a trick of the light.

“Sometimes,” she says.

Max nods.

"It's very real," he says. Lina's confusion must show on her face because he continues, "I keep looking at you and thinking maybe this isn't real, maybe I'm imagining it. But then I see this." His hand still on her cheek, his fingers brush against its line. 

Lina shudders. "It's not what you'd imagine," she says. 

"No," Max says quickly. "I mean, it's not, but—” He pauses, runs his fingers down the length of the scar one more time. “It's you,” he says. "It's beautiful."


	9. I Wish That I Could Know

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song accompaniment: "I Wish I Knew," Sharon Van Etten

October-December 1945 

Most nights, Max wakes on his cot in the living room with a sharp inhalation. It’s quiet, but Lina can hear it from her bedroom. She is not yet asleep, has been waiting. At the sound of Max’s breath, she rises from her bed and joins him at the kitchen table, where they sit across from each other, listening for Liesel’s yell, the evidence of her own nightmare. When Liesel wanders into the kitchen, Lina boils water and pours it into three mugs. They wrap their hands around it and drink it plain. On bad nights when the dreams are too terrifying to risk a return, Max and Liesel drink coffee. They crawl back into bed in the early morning hours, just as the sun is rising. Weariness clings to the walls like a coat of paint.

One night in December, two months into his stay in Molching, Max begins to scream. When Lina and Liesel rush to his side, they find him still asleep, thrashing about with his eyes closed, a horrible noise emanating from his mouth.

“Max,” Lina says, sitting down on the edge of the bed, grabbing him by the shoulders. The screaming grows louder, less human. Lina shakes him gently, then a bit harder. Max throws a hand up to block his face, clipping Lina on the chin as he jerks. “It’s all right, Max. You’re with us. You’re safe.”

When a knock sounds at the door, Lina goes to answer it and Liesel takes her place. It is Frau Lintz, the upstairs neighbor.

“Do you know what time it is?” she asks.

Instead of answering, Lina turns to look over her shoulder. The screaming has stopped, and Max’s eyes are now open. Liesel has taken his hand in hers and is speaking to him, but he doesn’t seem to hear.

“I’m sorry, Frau Lintz. It won’t happen again.” Lina shuts the door on the still-complaining woman, knowing she has probably told her a lie.

“Oh god,” Max says, sitting up in bed. Then he gets up and walks toward the just shut door, opening it and stepping out into the cold wearing only an undershirt and trousers.

Lina grabs both his coat and hers. “Everything’s fine,” she says to Liesel, another lie.

She runs after Max, watches him turn toward Munich Street, a place he usually avoids. She doesn’t call after him and slows to a walk before she reaches him, giving him time to adjust to her presence. When she sees his clenched fists relax, she assumes he’s noticed her and approaches him with his coat held out, placing it gently over his shoulders. He turns his head toward her but says nothing.

“Do you want me here, or—”

“Stay,” he says. “Please.”

They walk silently down Munich Street, Max staring at the cobblestones, Lina staring at him. When he finally looks up and catches her eye, she feels embarrassed and casts her gaze down, imagining blood underfoot, drops of red falling from the lash marks on Max’s body.

Max wraps his arms around himself, folding his body in half. His sigh sounds like it will cut him in two.

“I don’t know what to do,” he says.

Lina doesn’t either.

 

They never walk down Himmel Street. There’s no reason to, nothing there. Lina wouldn’t go even if there were.

“Can you tell which house it is?” Max asks early on.

Lina has never tried to pick her house out from the wreckage. To her, it’s not a home anymore, just a pile of remains. When she first returned to Molching, she visited the destruction but could only bear to stay for a few minutes. “I’ve never—” she begins.

“Yes,” Liesel says. “I know which one it is.”

This is the last time they discuss it. They do not ask her how she can tell, do not ask her to show it to them. Lina doesn’t want to know. Max doesn’t want to ask.

 

One day, while Liesel and Max are out of the house, Lina pulls the accordion down from its shelf and carries it to her room. Sitting on her bed and resting the instrument on her knees, she grasps the keyboard on one side and slips her hand through the loop on the other. She pulls her hands apart then pushes them back together, producing a terrible squealing sound. When she presses the buttons of the keyboard she hears only clicking. Looking up, she sees Max standing in the doorway. He looks down at his feet, embarrassed to be caught watching her. Lina thinks she should perhaps feel embarrassed to be caught, though she does not.

“He never taught me to play,” she says. “Why do you think that is?”

“I don’t know.”

“If he had asked me, I would have said yes. I would have just to spend time with him.”

As a child, Lina tagged along with her papa every chance she got. He was a good father—and a frequently unemployed one—and so spent quite a bit of time with her as she grew up. Now, though, it doesn’t feel like enough. Nothing could ever feel like enough.

Seemingly debating with himself, Max leaves his post by the door and sits down next to her.

“May I?” he asks.

Lina nods and hands him the accordion. Taking it, he plays one resounding note, then another. The third note falls flat, as does the next, but Max continues. The sounds he makes do not constitute a song—he is concentrating too hard to achieve any kind of rhythm, stopping and starting at irregular intervals—but they are fuller than the noises Lina was able to make. After ten minutes, Max stops. His playing is not good, is not enough, but it’s all he can do.


	10. I Need You Here

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song accompaniment: "Gutter Heart," Matthew and The Atlas

April 1946

A year after the war has ended, Allied tanks and trucks still roll down the streets of Munich, sometimes making their way to Molching, spilling out smiling soldiers with white teeth. Lina wonders when they’ll finally leave. She finds being around them uncomfortable and confusing. They rescued Max. They also killed her parents.

When the soldiers distribute pamphlets advertising free English classes for anyone under twenty-five—Max and Lina have missed the cutoff, too old to contribute to the new Germany these foreigners are intent on creating—Lina is suspicious. “Do you think it’s indoctrination?” she asks.

Liesel looks up from the pamphlet she has been reading aloud. “In what? Anti-Nazism?”

When the month-long course begins in Munich, Liesel goes. It’s the longest she and Lina have been apart since the destruction of Himmel Street, and Lina lies awake at night worrying about the planes that fly overhead, about another mistake, another bombing. When Liesel’s first letter arrives in the mail, Lina nearly cries from relief.

Liesel sends a new letter every week, sometimes more often than that. The letters talk about the course, about Munich, about the other students. Most of all, though, they talk about the American soldier-teachers and their strangeness. Only one of them actually speaks German, Liesel reports, while the others muddle through as best they can—rather ineffectually in her opinion.

“They smile constantly,” Liesel writes. “God only knows about what. Maybe they just want to show us their nice teeth.”

Reading this, Lina smiles. Liesel is right. The soldiers—the Americans at least—do have shockingly nice teeth. As far as Lina’s concerned, there’s something rather shameful about their perfection. Walking into the butcher’s one day, she had the door held open for her by one of these soldiers and smiled at him as best she could, the corners of her mouth turned upward ever so slightly. The soldier smiled back at her, much wider, revealing all of his teeth, determined, it seemed, to show her how this was actually done. Lina laughs at the memory. Quietly at first, then more and more loudly, not because it is especially hilarious but rather because laughter has become unfamiliar to her and the feeling of it now is so wonderful she wants to prolong it for as long as possible.

When Max comes in from yet another day of looking for work and finds Lina laughing to herself at the kitchen table, she is immediately embarrassed. He looks pleased, however, walking over to her and bending down to kiss her on the side of her forehead, his hand on top of her head. It’s the second time he’s ever kissed her, the first being that night in the basement, his voiceless response to her expression of love.

“It’s good to hear you laughing,” he says, filling the kettle with water and placing it on the stove.

When his back is to her, Lina reaches her hand to the site of his kiss, feeling its lingering warmth. Closing her eyes, she remembers the cold of the basement on Himmel Street, how his lips warmed her then too. As she flushes, she feels his cool hand held up to her throbbing eye, feels it caressing the scar on her cheek.

“Max,” she says. “Can you come back here for a minute?”

The kitchen is so small, he’s hardly taken a step before he’s within her reach. Taking hold of his shirt, Lina slowly pulls Max’s face back down to hers, kissing him softly on the lips. Then she stops momentarily, not drawing her face away yet, but testing the waters. When Max’s lips meet hers again, continuing the kiss, she closes her eyes, feeling the slight scratch of his stubbled face as it brushes up against hers. Then, suddenly, Max pulls away, shooting up with the quasi-dangerous rapidity of an opening umbrella.

“I’m so sorry,” he says, reaching for his coat and walking back out the door.

Lina sits at the table, not moving until the kettle whistles.

When Max returns an hour later, he sits down at the table, staring up at Lina as she chops vegetables for their dinner, his hands clasped together, looking like a child ready to be chastised.

“Say something,” he finally mutters when Lina fails to offer him the reprimand he’s seeking.

“Oh,” Lina says, putting her knife down and turning to look at him. “Is that my job?”

Max looks down at his hands, shakes his head at them. “No. Sorry.”

Lina’s frustration dissipates. He is so morose she wants to kneel beside him, wrap her body around him like a blanket, but she doesn’t. Instead, she takes a seat across from him, placing her hands on the table as well. There’s something about the posture that feels honest. Honesty is something Lina and Max had once. Now, Lina feels she is constantly fighting for it, constantly losing.

She steels herself for another battle. “You remember what I told you the night you left?” She is not willing to say it now, to risk so much only to have him walk away yet again.

Max nods.

“Is that something—?” she begins. A false start. “I still feel that way,” she says, hoping Max will respond to this statement she really means as a question. When he does not, she asks, “Do you feel that way?”

Max waits a long time before answering, so long that Lina wants to grab him by the shoulders, to shake it out of him.

“I don’t know if I can,” he finally says, his voice barely louder than a whisper.

“What do you mean?” Lina asks.

“You shouldn’t want me, you know. I’m not… I left my family behind. I can’t be trusted.”

“But I do trust you,” Lina says, remembering for the first time in years her promise to help Max find his family. _Do you trust me?_ she wants to ask. _Do you still?_ It is this trust between them—their tenuous grasp upon it—that keeps her from reaching for his hand, though she desperately wants to. It would mean more in this moment, she knows, would be thrusting something upon him he hasn’t asked for.

“I think maybe I should go to bed,” Max says, pulling his hands back toward himself. “I’m not very hungry.”

Lina thinks she should protest, tell him to wait just a few minutes longer, to eat something, even if it’s small. She does not. Instead she says, “Why don’t you sleep in Liesel’s bed? So the light won’t bother you?” There is no door between the kitchen and Max’s makeshift bedroom.

He looks at her suspiciously, as if she’s trying to trick him, but then agrees, trudges off to her and Liesel’s room with slumped shoulders, shutting the door behind him to block out the light, to block out Lina.

Once he’s gone, making dinner feels like too much of a burden. It’s not worth it if only she’s eating it. Lina wants to take the carrots and potatoes she’s been chopping and throw them in the garbage, but she cannot bring herself to waste food this way. She stands by the cutting board, slowly picking up each coin-sized disc of carrot and depositing it in her mouth. The potatoes she puts in a bowl for later, knowing she cannot eat them raw, too tired to cook them. Within an hour, she is hungry again. As her stomach grumbles, she thinks of Max and the hunger he must be feeling after skipping dinner. The mutual deprivation creates a closeness between them, Lina thinks. She savors the feeling warily, sensing danger in her enjoyment. Tomorrow, she tells herself, she will get up and make breakfast for both of them.

She looks at the door behind which Max sleeps, the door to her room, and decides she doesn’t belong there, not tonight. To suggest that he sleep in her room and then join him there feels like a violation, like trickery in some way. Instead, she crawls into his bed, its own kind of intimacy to be sure but one that feels more acceptable.

His pillow smells like him, like what Lina thinks of when she thinks of Max—a smell like warm straw, like day trips to the farmland surrounding Molching, trips her father would take them on when the oppressive grayness of town became too much. This is what Max has always been for Lina—a place removed, a respite. Perhaps it’s due to the circumstances of their meeting, the fact that Max had to be kept hidden from the rest of the world and therefore always felt to Lina like a break from it. The idea that his isolation, his suffering may have indirectly brought her comfort makes Lina shudder. As she pulls Max’s sheet and blanket around herself, the scent changes. They smell like him too, she realizes, the odor they carry the result of their contact with his body, but they do not smell like her memories of him. They are sour, imbued with the smell of nervous sweat, of Max’s own memories, of nightmares come to life. Isolation and suffering reflected more directly.

In the morning, Lina wakes to the smell of coffee, opening her eyes to find Max sitting on the edge of the cot, a mug of coffee in one hand, a plate of fried potatoes in the other—the potatoes from last night.

“You didn’t eat dinner,” he says, holding the plate out to her as if, given this state of affairs, the five-step walk to the kitchen would be too far.

“You didn’t either.” Lina takes the plate from him anyway, not wanting to argue.

Lina can feel Max’s eyes on her as she eats. She keeps expecting him to stand up, to walk to the table so she can follow him and they can sit together, close but not this close. Max, Lina has realized, does not want the same closeness from her that she desires of him. As a result, his position at the foot of her bed—his bed really—feels prickly and uncomfortable.

“I’ve been acting cowardly,” Max finally says, remaining seated. “I have to leave.”

Panicked, Lina searches the room, looking for something to force Max to stay. Instinctively, she reaches for his hand, but he pulls it away.

“It’s my family,” he says. “I’ve been too afraid to look for them. But I have to, I think. I have to know.”

“I can help you.”

Max shakes his head no, but he’s still sitting right beside her, and, even though just seconds earlier Lina was wishing for distance, she feels the lack of it now means something.

“I said I would,” she continues. “I said I’d help you look back…” She cannot bring herself to say, _back at Himmel Street._ “Back then,” she says.

“That was a long time ago.”

Max stares at his lap, and Lina draws in a deep breath, gathering her courage, then reaches for his face, gentling pulling it up to look at her.

“Do you not trust me anymore?” she asks. “You trusted me then. You didn’t even know me, and you trusted me.”

“You couldn’t leave Liesel,” he says, and though he’s right, it sounds like an excuse.

“She could come with us,” Lina says.

Max scoffs. Then, seeing the earnestness in Lina’s face, “I can’t upend your lives like that.”

 _You already have,_ Lina wants to tell him. _All those years ago._ He’s changed them both forever, carved out a space in their lives, and, for Lina at least, that space will always be there, will be filled by him or by no one. She can already feel an emptiness creeping its way inside her chest. It stings, feels so much worse than the pang—the pleasure—of an empty stomach.

“I wouldn’t mind,” Lina says. “I mean, if you’re just thinking of me, I’d be happier going with you, happier than staying here. If it’s something else…” She cannot finish the sentence. “I could be helpful,” she says. “When you talk to people, I can take notes. I’m good at that.”

“By people, you mean people who were in the camps?”

“Yes.”

“No,” Max says. “No. You cannot be there.”

“But I wouldn’t—”

“Lina.” As Max’s voice rises, Lina realizes this is the closest to yelling she’s ever heard him—the closest during his waking moments at least. “They won’t want you there,” he says. He softens somewhat before continuing. “It’s not your fault, but they’ll see you, they’ll hear you speak. It will be too much.”

Lina understands. The thought has never occurred to her, but now that it's been said—almost said—it makes sense to her. Before the war, she spent so much time worrying about her too-dark hair, her neither slender nor robust frame, her failure to be what a German girl should. The idea now that she might be too German, might be a painful reminder to someone, requires an adjustment of thinking.

“Of course,” she says. “I didn’t realize, but of course. I could still come, though. I could wait while you talk to people, come with you if you ever needed to speak with someone more…" _German._  "Well, someone who’s Germanness was never under dispute.”

Max turns his gaze back to his lap. “I won’t want you there either.”

 _Am I too much for you as well?_ Lina wonders.

“It’s not you,” Max says. “You’re not…”

He struggles to continue, and Lina wishes he would look at her again. _Look at me,_ she wants to yell. _I’m here. Just look at me._

“I owe you everything,” Max says. “You and your family. And it’s more than that.”

Lina expects him to continue, to tell her what more there is. She feels as though she’s awaiting a confession, but, when none arrives, she does not press further. She’s too tired.

“When will you leave?” she asks.

“Tomorrow,” Max says. “Maybe the day after.”

The air catches in Lina's throat. For a moment she cannot breathe.

“You can’t,” she says.

“I have to.”

“No, I mean you can’t leave so soon. You can’t. You have to wait for Liesel. You can’t leave without saying goodbye to her. I won’t let you.”

Max opens his mouth to protest, but, when he sees the look of determination on Lina’s face, he reconsiders. “All right,” he says. “I’ll wait for Liesel. Then I’ll leave.”

The day after Liesel’s return to Molching, Max walks out the door, leaving in the daylight this time. Lina and Liesel watch from the window, waiting for a final glance or wave. Max does not look back.


	11. Everybody's Gone at Last

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song accompaniment: "No Name No. 5," Elliott Smith

May-June 1946

Shortly after Max Vandenburg walks out of Lina’s life, Hans Junior walks back in. Briefly. The first thing he says when she opens the door and finds him standing there is not _Hello,_ or _I’m sorry,_ but “I just found out.”

Lina does not need to ask what he’s talking about. Her brother stands perfectly still, erect, as if any deviation will send him crumpling to the ground. Even with this deceptively composed posture, Lina doesn’t think she’s ever seen him this scared. She wonders if she should embrace him, or perhaps want to embrace him, but she doesn’t. Doesn’t do it, doesn’t want to.

“It’s been three years,” she says.

Her brother deflates slightly, then gathers himself up again. “No one told me,” he says.

“That’s the path you chose,” Lina says. She invites him inside.

In the kitchen, Lina and Hans Junior sit at the table while Liesel leans against the counter, watching. Hans looks at Liesel warily, the little girl who was not reading _Mein Kampf,_ all grown up. Lina has made them all coffee but none of them drink it.

“I was in Russia,” Hans says. “They kept me in one of their prisons for years.” Hans wraps his hands around his mug, squeezing it until his knuckles turn white. Lina sees that the fingernails on his right hand are ridged and thin, fragile-looking, as if violence has been done to them.

“I’m sorry,” Lina says.

“Are you?” Hans asks.

“Yes.” She truly is. She has read about the Soviets and their camps. She cannot say it’s a fate she would not wish on anyone, but she can say she would not wish it on her brother.

“I went to Trudy first. She told me what happened.” Hans holds his mug so tightly, Lina worries it will shatter. “ _Die Ami_ ,” he says. _The Allies._ “I don’t know how they live with themselves.”

Every day Lina walks past her neighbors and thinks, _You knew what was happening. You knew, and you did nothing._ She wonders what she would have done had Max not appeared on their doorstep, if her papa had never made his promise. Would she have been silent, let it all happen? The answer, she knows, is yes. “I don’t know how any of us live with ourselves,” she says.

The muscles tighten in Hans’s face. “You never supported our cause, never wanted us to win.”

“You’re right,” Lina says. “I didn’t.”

Hans blinks rapidly, his surprise revealing the statement for what it was—the kind of thing someone says without meaning it, the intention to be hurtful rather than truthful. In this case, however, it is true.

“If you want to talk about Mama and Papa and how much you loved them,” Lina says, “that’s good. But if you want to talk about the war, you’ll have to leave.”

Hans breathes in deeply and sits up straighter, prepares himself.

“Can you show me?” he asks.

All these years later, Himmel Street is still a pile of ash and rubble, its homes reduced to detritus. No one has deemed it worthy of rehabilitation. Most of its residents are dead now, the remaining ones too poor to muster any sort of rebuilding effort. Standing in the middle of the street, her stunned brother beside her, Lina feels the town could have at least cleared away some of the debris, showed some concern. Then again, as she imagines her home being carted off brick by brick, she reconsiders.

“I’ve never been able to make out which one it is,” Lina says.

She wonders if Liesel would still know the difference. Liesel has, of course, elected not to accompany them, wanting nothing to do with this man she remembers only as a source of sadness and fear, as a symbol of the philosophy that separated her from her mother and sent Max into hiding, that killed millions. Lina, however, remembers Hans Junior as he was before the war, before Hitler. Even then he was haughty, quick to anger, no great defender of anyone who was different from him. But he was not a bully either, did not actively belittle others. And he was her big brother, the boy who showed her how to stuff her too-large, hand-me-down shoes with socks and kick a soccer ball properly. The boy who always let her carry his hot potato to school on cold days—back when they had enough money to waste food on something as frivolous as hand-warming—and who stood up for her whenever Mama’s rages became excessive. The boy she always saw as a protector, grown into a man who frightens her.

He doesn’t seem so frightening now, however. He doesn’t even seem so grown. He is holding Lina’s hand, having grabbed it a few blocks from Himmel, the sudden feel of his hand in hers reminding Lina of a child grabbing for his mother before crossing a busy street. Now, surveying the remains of his former home, the site of his parents’ death, Hans lets go of Lina’s hand and pulls her into a hug. Bending his head to rest on her shoulder, he begins to sob.

“Oh,” Lina says, slowly raising her arms and wrapping them around her brother. _It’s all right,_ she wants to say, but of course it’s not. “I’m sorry,” she says instead, as if Mama and Papa were Hans’s parents exclusively, as if this tragedy has not befallen her as well. “I’m so sorry, Hans.”

His head still on her shoulder, Hans draws in a shaky breath. “This is why it had to happen,” he says, “why the Fuhrer had to do what he did. No one else was going to protect us.”

Lina loosens her grip on her brother, but Hans continues to cling to her tightly, more tightly than before even, sensing her desire to pull away.

“His plan for the Jews, the gypsies, it was to strengthen us. To prepare us to fight back against these murderers.”

“Hitler was a murderer,” Lina says.

“Sometimes hard choices must be made.”

Lina closes her eyes and sighs deeply. She does not push Hans away, but rather brings him in closer, squeezing his shoulders. She is trying to get the feel of him, to assign to memory what it feels like to have a brother. When she is done, she breaks free of his embrace.

“Goodbye, Hans,” she says, turning her back before he can respond, walking away from him as tears roll down her cheeks.

 

When Max learns of his mother’s death at Buchenwald, he does not cry. He calmly thanks the woman who told him, a survivor who knew his mother there, and returns to the dingy hotel where he’s been staying in Stuttgart, just two blocks from his former home, a home now occupied by another family, an intact one. His mother is the last family member he’s managed to track down, the last death to be confirmed, the last person he left behind in that apartment whose fate he now knows.

Most of her fate anyway.

“Do you want to know how she died?” the woman had asked him.

Her face told him he should say no, that asking her to tell would be too painful, too cruel. Max did say no, but for his own sake, not hers.

Now, alone in his hotel room, Max sees the decision for what it is—a cowardly one, as so many of his decisions have been. Staring at the wall in front of him, Max follows the paths of its many cracks, outlining the decisions that have brought him to this point, the first decision of course being the most cowardly of all—his betrayal of his family, his relief as they pushed him out the door. He did not want to know then either, did not look back to see the pain etched across their faces, the hurt. Max feels his refusal to know the details of his mother’s death sitting in his chest like a sting swallowed. Another refusal to look, to see, to bear witness. He knows his refusal to see his mother’s death, to know it, is the same as his refusal to turn and look that night seven years ago. He must not refuse this time.

The next morning, he returns to the shantytown where he found the woman only to learn that she has gone, moved onto the next Displaced Persons camp. He has come too late.

In the town that was once his home, Max sits down on the pavement and sobs.  


End file.
